Distressed scientist | https://teapaw.org/t.co/OkcKbDPkoY
SF & Canada
Joined September 2023
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Announcing The Distressed Scientists Department - a living notebook to make research a playground again.
And because knowledge is more than the PDF.
I turned down a “safe” PhD this year when I internalized that grants truly do take longer than experiments and that 5 years in grad school can lock you into 50 years of the same niche.
I wasn't excited to do science anymore.
I was ready to abandon the field completely, but watching it spiral from a distance felt worse.
So I made myself a deal.
One year, a lab on digital paper, dedicated to sharing the art & architecture, ache & absurdity of doing science in 2025.
The Dept. has three hallways to start:
→ The Logbook: journalling notes, thoughts, and research;
→ The Paper Trail: dissecting the canon formative to scientific progress;
→ The Dossier: cases of organizations, ideas, and scientists - often overlooked and underrated.
Some pages are already in the shelves - feel free to roam the corridors, scribble in the margins. Links below.
Welcome to the Department.
I suspect the career plateau that stems from one's ~late 20s and morphs into a mid-life crisis is largely a consequence of a loss of quantitative success metrics ('measurable wins').
Unless you work in a field like film (Oscar, Tony, Emmy), literature (Pulitzer, National Book Award), or research (Nobel, Fields), you lose most externally recognizable markers of achievement after college, if not earlier. Salary and title are rather poor substitutes.
Naturally, as we age, we adopt more qualitative measures of a life well lived. But we underestimate how much human ambition depends on the ability to track and look back on progress, to make sense of one's direction, time, sacrifice, "worth."
And without periodic signposts, many people find themselves feeling lost, directionless, or wondering where the years went.
Jolie retweeted
The new goal at @AsimovPress is to publish exceptional, technical, long-form reporting on biotechnology; the types of stories that no outlet is doing.
We are allocating most of our budget toward paying great journalists and also artists who can bring these stories to life. The long-term aim is to win a Pulitzer for biotechnology reporting. This also means we'll be publishing less often, because these stories can take 3-6 months to produce.
We'll publish non-reported essays on occasion, but only if they have a thesis that is super compelling and, ideally, could *only* be written by a particular person. (e.g. We have a piece coming up about lead testing, written by a person who is developing those kits.)
Please email [email protected] if you have a big story that you are itching to write; especially if other outlets aren't willing to give you the time or funds to do it properly.
Jolie retweeted
A single, well-designed experiment can overturn theories. I don't see this often today (what with Cell papers and their 99 figures), but there are many papers from before 1970 that seem to fit this description.
In 1943, for example, Luria and Delbrück tested whether bacteria became resistant after encountering a virus or were already resistant beforehand. (The widespread belief, at that time, was that cells became resistant to viruses by touching them.) The dup grew separate bacterial cultures, exposed each to phages, and counted the survivors. If exposure to a virus *induced* resistance, the cultures should produce a similar number of survivors. Instead, the counts varied a lot, just as you'd expect if a resistance mutation arose early in some cultures, but late or never in others.
In the 1860s, Louis Pasteur used swan-neck flasks to dismantle spontaneous generation. He boiled broths in flasks with long, curved necks that would allow air to enter and yet trap dust. In flasks where dust could reach the broth, contamination followed. In open-air flasks with a bent neck, the broth never became contaminated. This experiment suggested that broths did not "spontaneously" generate life; they became contaminated by microbes clinging to dust in the air.
Can we bring back these "classic" experiments? I think so.
Perhaps there should be a research journal that publishes short papers built around a single, extremely well-designed experiment. If this journal were well-funded (a stretch of the imagination), it could host little workshops where researchers discussed an open debate and decided, together, what experiment would resolve it one way or another. It's effectively a sort of pre-registration.
Then, the journal could fund scientists from each group to actually do the experiment and resolve that debate, and then publish the experiment, null or positive. I'm skeptical that this will ever happen, of course; there are too many crooked and perverse incentives in scientific publishing. But it's probably how science ought to be done. The journal could be called PARADOX.
The Nobel Prize has some of the most incredible underrated lore in the history of science:
> was banned by Hitler in 1937 after the Peace Prize went to a journalist in a concentration camp
> was voted to a German anyway in 1939, who would later be arrested by the Gestapo for accepting
> British, Swedish, French, and American peers continued to nominate Germans throughout Hitler's ban as a symbol of camaraderie
> was dissolved in acid by a Hungarian chemist protecting his friends' medals
> Einstein wrote it into his divorce settlement because he was so confident he would eventually win it
There is so much history and politics and science entangled in this award, what an honour to go through some of its source material
How did the Nobel Prize become the status symbol of science?
joliegan.com/nobel/
PSA: we have 'peptides' (small molecule/biologics) for migraines, injectable and oral, that work as quickly as within 10-15 minutes, $100-200 per dose
How did the Nobel Prize become the status symbol of science?
joliegan.com/nobel/
An encapsulation of some recent thoughts, happy Sunday
What a pleasure @Dr_Dark_Matter_
The Art of Funding the Next Scientific Renaissance
Are we funding the next scientific revolution—or rewarding people for playing it safe?
@joliegans joins me for Beauty & the Math Ep. 1 on art, ambition & a new age of discovery.
youtube.com/watch?v=Fkv7KBPP…
Jolie retweeted
“China is not the world’s largest command economy. It is a continent-sized Silicon Valley.”
Awesome piece by @RobinRivaton on China’s local governments and industrial clusters: worksinprogress.co/issue/chi…
An underrated cost of America losing touch with the Great Books is the ignorance of their Chinese counterparts. Anyone who sees China as a competitor in science, progress, politics should want to understand Confucius, Mengzi, and Laozi.
Jolie retweeted
Life updates: @AsimovPress is officially back, with a renewed focus on original reporting and arguments in biotechnology.
Also, we'll be helping (some) scientists launch philanthropic funds around the ideas published in the magazine with @RenPhilanthropy. More on this soon!
It's official: We're back!
Asimov Press is returning with a sharper focus on intensive reporting in biotechnology. We're also working with @RenPhilanthropy to build our ideas in the real world.
See more: press.asimov.com/articles/ba…
How did Alexander Hamilton learn to read and write?
I spent a day at his father in law's upstate New York mansion to learn how an orphaned boy, in Nevis, managed to learn English, and command it so powerfully it became his ticket for immigration, college, and becoming Washington's right hand.
He was barred from the Church of England school, because he was an illegitimate child. It's rumoured that he ended up going to a Jewish school instead, where, as a young child, he was able to recite the Decalogue.
When his mother died in 1768, she left him an inheritance of 13 books, which was an abnormally large collection for a woman of her economic class and of the time. As a child, he would read those books over and over, learning syntax, style, and vocabulary in both English and French.
That year he started working for a merchant house. When his boss, a New Yorker, got sick and sailed away, he left the teenager running all correspondence for the business. There are preserved letters that Hamilton would write to ship captains communicating inventory and prices.
Then, in 1772, when he was 17, a hurricane ripped his home island apart. He wrote a passionate and emotional description of it, addressed to none other than his estranged father. He had no reason to believe he would respond, after years of no contact, but perhaps it was a last attempt. Before there was Hamilton the strategist, there was Alexander, a boy who just needed his father.
He shared it with a single minister on the island, who read it and sent it to the local paper. It made rounds. Strangers read it; it moved wealthy benefactors, who decided to pool money and put him on a boat to what would become the United States.
